// ARCHIVE
Case study // 01
A multi-award-winning marketplace that won three major awards across BestWeb.lk and Global Business Excellence in its first year.
// CONTEXT
Four separate retail businesses, covering flowers, cakes, clothing and gifts, each wanted an online storefront. Running four codebases would have meant four carts, four checkouts and four sets of vendor tooling to maintain. The brief was one platform that presents four distinct shopfronts while sharing a single cart, checkout, search and wishlist underneath.
// CONSTRAINTS
// DECISIONS
Exposing API keys client-side was unacceptable, and a single key's rate limit would have capped concurrent image generation during peak hours, precisely when the AI design studio is most used.
Calling Gemini directly from the client with a public key, which is the fastest path to a demo and the fastest path to a leaked key and an unbounded bill.
The buyer base is overwhelmingly mobile, where typing a strong password is friction and reusing a weak one is the norm. Biometric unlock removed both problems and cut abandoned logins.
Password plus SMS OTP, which adds per-message cost, depends on carrier deliverability, and is phishable in a way passkeys are not.
Authorisation enforced only in the UI is decoration. Putting it in the rules layer means a vendor cannot read another vendor's orders even with a hand-crafted request, and the emulator tests stop a future refactor from quietly widening access.
Client-side route guards plus trusted server code paths, which works until someone calls the database directly.
One team, one release cadence, one set of business logic. Capacitor still gave access to push notifications, camera and native share, which was the whole reason for wanting an app.
A React Native or fully native rebuild, which would have doubled the surface area for a seven-person team and split the feature roadmap in two.
// OUTCOME
// RECOGNITION
This is the build that took three major awards across BestWeb.lk 2026 and the Global Business Excellence Awards 2026 in its first year of entry — Gold for Best Micro Enterprises Website, Winner for Most Popular, and Winner for Best Gifting Website in Sri Lanka. The LK Domain Registry also presented me a Certificate of Appreciation as one of the developers behind the winning websites.
Gold Winner · Judged category, 2026
“Awarded to Zonova Pvt Ltd for their website www.zonova.lk”
I built the winning site end to end — storefront, vendor dashboard, and the services behind both.
Winner · Decided by public vote, 2026
“Awarded to Zonova Pvt Ltd for their website www.zonova.lk”
The same site, voted for by the public — the build people chose to keep using.
Winner · Global Business Excellence Awards, 2026
“Winner — Best Website Awards, presented to Zonova Pvt Ltd for Best Gifting Website www.zonova.lk”
I built the four-vertical marketplace and custom gifting workflow behind the win, unified with real-time order tracking.
// REFLECTION
The testing baseline should have come first, not once the codebase was already large. Retrofitting Firestore rules tests across existing collections took far longer than writing them alongside the rules would have. On the next platform I would stand up the emulator and the rules suite in week one.